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"Follower Factory" Exposed and Under Investigation

Administrator from GB

joined:May 9, 2000
posts:25047
votes: 660

An in-depth investigation by the New York Times into buying followers has uncovered a large business and a an extensive list of "clients" paying to add followers to boost their profiles. Mysterious "families of bots appear when an account gets the treatment. The fake accounts are also stealing genuine profiles and modifying their appearance to possibly evade detection.

Fake followers just make accounts hollow, imho.

It's an interesting article, and the findings will probably come as no suprise to many.

Kristin Binns, a Twitter spokeswoman, said the company did not typically suspend users suspected of buying bots, in part because it is difficult for the business to know who is responsible for any given purchase. Twitter would not say whether a sample of fake accounts provided by The Times — each based on a real user — violated the company’s policies against impersonation.

“We continue to fight hard to tackle any malicious automation on our platform as well as false or spam accounts,” Ms. Binns said.

New User from US

joined:Jan 25, 2018
posts:10
votes: 0

Twitter says they're looking into the whole bot issue but I can't imagine they will truly do a bot sweep and delete all the fake accounts. Then people will realize how many fake users there are on Twitter and stock will plummet. They're making a big splash about the Russian troll factory though because of the terrible press.